head to head · open source
crawlee vs anakin
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. anakin has 4,394 stars, 181 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 488% (25,841 vs 4,394 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; anakin is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, anakin 4%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (playwright, scraper), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| crawlee | anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 181 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick anakin if
- You want the anakin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and anakin fits your workflow better
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
About anakin
AnakinScraper OSS is an open source, self hosted web scraping API written in Go that converts any website into LLM ready markdown or structured JSON, built for teams running RAG pipelines, AI agents and large scale data extraction.
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or anakin more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and anakin has 4,394. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and anakin free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and anakin under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and anakin?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and anakin in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, crawlee or anakin?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose anakin if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.